Hey, Marseille
I woke up thinking about you
I enjoy your company now
Your diversity
Your hospitality
And you respond by giving me
Tons of inspiration
You have made me
Walk paths I never before dared
You have learned me a lesson
About myself
You have shown me that
Beauty can be found everywhere and in
Everyone
You have willingly showed me
So much of
What you have to offer
I am overwhelmed by your vast history
By the proves found in your very heart
The proves of a rich and proud past
However, I see no future for us
In a few days
Our roads will part
Though I will carry with me
The spirit you have shown me
Thrice in a day
It makes me happy
I leave with a smile
Because it took only
One of them
And I got three
Three incidents in one single day
All of them proving the prejudice wrong
It’s nice being exposed to people
Regular, ordinary people
We need to meet each other
We all want and need to communicate
Despite the language barrier
Eventually
We make it
And we smile
Together
Because we know
We did it
We did it well
Together
The friendliness
The service
The hospitality
Where you’d least expect it
An attitude not taken out of thin air, but
Because of what you hear
What you’re told from sources you regard as credible
And you think it to be true
Thus creating an «us and them» attitude
A distance
A vertical distance
So prejucidal
So respectless
So wrong
Why is it
Time and time again
That we experience that
The ones we don’t
Identify with
The ones with the most to prove
Them
Often turn out to be
The nicest, most friendly people
And those who are most like ourselves
Us
Are the ones we get most annoyed by
The rude ones
The ones that we complain about
Because we’d «expect more of them»?
Why?
Why can’t we get out of this state of extreme
Arrogance?
Why can’t people just behave like people
With respect, understanding and an open mind
When meeting other people?
No matter what
Why is it so hard for people to
Communicate
When we have such strong opinions
About how everyone but ourselves should do it?
Quite some double standard
Body language can easily be misunderstood
If it’s even noticed
Moods aren’t stable
And our references to emotions vary a lot
Using tone of voice as the prime communicative tool
Can cause quite a few challenges
A communicative dead end street
Talking to each other as the intutive communicative tool
Is absolutely to be preferred
Then all the others are secondary
They are contextual
Words can easily be changed
Sentences rephrased
Why can’t we just remember
How we prefer that others communicate with us
And then go execute that ourselves?
Food makes me happy
Water makes me live
Toilets make me work
Tasty food, spicy food
It needn’t be in the hot spicy way (I’d rather it didn’t)
Like a proper Moroccan tagine
Or a proper Italian pizza
Or a wonderful bouillabaise
Oh, joy!
Bring along lots of cold water
I won’t mind if it has a taste of lemon or lime
And you may also make the water «sparkly»
I’ll survive
Lovely!
Why don’t the human rights
Say that everyone should have the right
To have easy access to a toilet?
No person can function without
No replicas
Only original artifacts
Up to five thousand years old
Egyptian, Greek, Roman
From Africa, South America, Oceania
Lucky as you are
You can actually get to
Touch
Many of these wonderful greetings from
The history of our cultures
Of human kind
Of our magnificent world
That’s quite massive
For just a moment
Try to comprehend the beauty
Of the fact that
Some thousands of years ago
A person living in Egypt
Or in the Roman empire
Touched… no, made this thing
In front of you
And now you stand here
A long way from Egypt or Rome
Aeons later
Touching what he made
This gift from a time long gone
This marvellous artifact that
Looks as if it was made
Just yesterday
That’s mind-boggling!
